The present invention relates to work management technology and more particularly to a work management system suitable for managing projects performed by individuals or groups belonging to organizations.
One of technologies for managing work performed by a plurality of organization members is workflow management technology. Two types of work progress control method used by the workflow management technology are:
Data driven type: Data to be processed is made available in accordance with a process definition describing a series of work execution sequences included in the work in order to control the task progress.
Event driven type: A worker is notified of the start of a task, associated with a generated event, in accordance with a process definition describing the start condition of the task included in the work in order to control the task progress.
Some of the known configurations of workflow management systems include xe2x80x9cWorkflow Systemxe2x80x9d disclosed in JP-A-07-160636 and xe2x80x9cWorkflow Support Systemxe2x80x9d disclosed in JP-A-08-101817.
Also known as a prior art of changing a series of execution sequences is xe2x80x9cWorkflow Management Systemsxe2x80x9d disclosed in JP-A-08-221486.
Work to which the present invention is applied is a project to be executed by individuals or groups belonging to organizations. Work includes tasks meeting the following three conditions:
A task is included in one or more types of work executed in an organization;
A task is executed by a specific individual or by a plurality of members belonging to a specific group; and
Tasks are associated with each other.
An example of work to which the present invention applies is patent processing, executed by an inventor, which includes organized work such as a patent application, request for examination, and infringement countermeasures. That is, the inventor performs the task of writing a patent specification during a patent application work, the task of deciding whether to request an examination during a consideration of examination request, and the task of checking whether or not a patent is infringed during infringement checking.
As compared with other types of work, a project executed by an individual of an organization or a project has the following features:
Tasks are generated non-continuously because each task begins when a task instruction is received, when necessary information is made available, or when a date has arrived.
Although some tasks included in work are executed in time sequence, there are some other tasks which need not be executed in time sequence and which are included or associated with the work.
The contents of a task may be changed during execution of the work.
When work to which the present invention is to be applied is managed by the conventional workflow management technology, there are problems described below.
The problems with the data driven type workflow management system are as follows:
Completion of a task triggers the next task linearly-connected in time sequence in the process definition. This makes it difficult to manage work including a plurality of tasks generated non-continuously.
Changing the contents of tasks in the process definition during execution of work makes it difficult to integrally manage the progress of the tasks of other like work.
The problems with the event driven type workflow management system are as follows:
It is difficult to monitor the progress of tasks based on the time sequence of the tasks included in a work.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a work management method and system which manage a project executed by individuals or groups belonging to an organization.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a technology that makes it easy to monitor the progress of tasks included in the event driven workflow.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a computer readable recording medium storing therein a program which implements the above-described method.
To achieve the above object, an aspect of the present invention provides a work management method for use in a system comprising one or more user terminals and one or more servers connected to the user terminals. The work management method for managing a process based on a process definition in which business phases, each composed of one or more tasks, are connected linearly in time sequence comprises the steps of:
in each of the servers, preparing in memory the process definition, task definition defining tasks for each business phase, and a work management table for managing work progress, and providing a workflow management unit, a task management unit, and an event management unit;
in the event management unit, providing program means for adding an event to, or deleting the event from, an event queue in response to an event addition request or an event deletion request, for monitoring a generation of the events stored in the event queue, for issuing a task status transition request to the task management unit in response to the generation of the event, and for deleting the generated event from the event queue;
in the task management unit, providing program means for storing the tasks or a task status or both in a work management table in response to a task addition request or the task status transition request, for issuing the event addition request or the event deletion request based on a task definition of the tasks and, when all the tasks of a business phase are completed, for issuing a phase transition request to the workflow management unit; and
in the workflow management unit, providing program means for adding a next business phase and phase status to the work management table in response to a new work generation request or the phase transition request and based on the process definition, for obtaining a task list from the task definition corresponding to the business phase, and for issuing the task addition request to the task management unit.
A completion condition is set in a first business phase of the process definition information and, in response to whether or not the completion condition is satisfied during execution of the first business phase, the workflow management unit activates a second business phase following the first business phase.
A business phase transition condition is set in a first business phase of the process definition information and, in response to whether or not the transition condition is satisfied during execution of the first business phase, the workflow management unit activates a second business phase following the first business phase.